


Wool and Tallow

by orangeflavor



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dead Daenerys Targaryen, F/M, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Intimacy, Longing, Post-Battle of Winterfell, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, Sharing a Bed, they truly are dumbasses in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-04-05 19:55:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19047280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orangeflavor/pseuds/orangeflavor
Summary: "She has always been his lady sister, even when she wasn’t, and he can never want for more.  Bastards learn early to bury their desires, and he is – he well and truly is a bastard, because – blood or not – only bastards could crave like this.Could love like this."-  Jon and Sansa, Season 8 AU.  After the Battle of Winterfell, the mending begins in earnest.





	1. To Staunch the Screams

**Author's Note:**

> Part One of either a two or three chapter story. Season 8 AU after 8x03, wherein Dany has died in the Battle for Winterfell and the North has no reason to march on King's Landing. The Starks learn how to live in the aftermath.

Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Wool and Tallow

Chapter One: To Staunch the Screams

" _Perhaps that is the matter at heart. Perhaps it will never make sense. Perhaps loss like this isn't supposed to."_  - Jon and Sansa, Season 8 AU. After the Battle of Winterfell, the mending begins in earnest.

* * *

Sansa finds that sewing flesh is not so very different from sewing cloth, perhaps, except, for the shrieks and groans that accompany her new needlework.

All the same, she knows how to bind a tear, where to set the seams, how to recognize the places where it's thinnest, where the slightest tug may pull her work loose, where it takes more than delicacy to keep a slit from rending.

She wonders if the blood will ever wash from beneath her fingernails, or if the tiny callouses will ever recede from the edges of her forefingers, or if she will ever again stitch a dress or a handkerchief or a glove without the lingering tang of copper filling her nose.

Even still, Sansa puts her hands to the needle and mends the North. She patches the rips, she closes the holes.

It's her own hand that tends to the gash along Jon's forehead in his fever sleep, and when he wakes to a winter-beaten dawn, the sun a snow-washed blur at his window, he thinks he can feel her touch even now.

He blinks awake to a quiet room, to Sansa's room. She's slumped in a bedside chair, dozing, her needlework hanging precariously from her lap.

But she's alive, and so is he, and there is peace in this kind of quiet. A peace he hadn't expected.

Jon closes his eyes, the sound of her steady breathing lulling him back to sleep.

The harrowing space between them begins to slowly stitch closed.

* * *

"It doesn't look that bad," Arya remarks, slurping up her stew beside him.

Jon raises a brow but then winces at the way it tugs the stiches along his forehead.

"Though it'll probably scar," she adds as an afterthought.

"It wouldn't be the first." Jon looks at his own bowl of stew when he says it, fingers itching to spread across his chest in some kind of comfort, some kind of anchoring.

He's never known death  _not_  to scar, is the thing, and when he finally looks up to glance around the table, to see Sam offering a hesitant smile, with no Edd beside him, to see Davos staring resolutely into the flaming hearth, to see Tormund tearing into his meal as though he expects it to be his last – when he finally sees the way death has settled so seamlessly and familiarly in the aftermath, in the very shadows of their halls, in the lines of their faces and the air between their words – he wishes it were a lesson he'd never learned in the first place those many years ago, the night his own brothers ended his watch with their very hands.

Arya nudges him with an elbow, dipping into her bowl again. "Eat," she says softly, eyes catching the way his hand lingers over his chest. "You have to eat." And then she says no more, eating away the silence like the rest of them.

* * *

"Is it over? Is it finished?" Sansa asks Bran one day while they sit in the godswood, a red shade of leaves stretching over their fur-lined forms while she worries a thumb into her gloved palm, breath tight in her chest.

They are still burning bodies beyond Winterfell's walls, the smoke a sour plume she smells even in her sleep – maybe especially then, and she needs it to be over now more than ever. She needs her haunts to stay dead this time.

Bran tilts his head slightly, a not-unsympathetic smile toying at his lips – but it's tinged with a kind of sorrow Sansa has learned to recognize early on. "Nothing is ever finished," he answers her.

Sansa stares at her brother. She looks down to her hands, shaking. She huffs a cold breath out into the air, stands stiffly. She stalks a few feet away, stalks back, turns back to him. "You know Bran, sometimes I miss you –  _really_  miss you. Even when we're in the same room," she bites out. Her lip trembles, but she tugs it back behind her teeth, keeps it trapped behind that delicate Stark composure.

Bran's eyes drift past her shoulder, lost somewhere in the haze of snow, and Sansa swears she sees the minute tightening of his hands in his lap. "I do, too, sometimes," he breathes carefully.

Sansa's eyes flutter shut as she takes a deep breath, her grief and her resentment and her guilt sinking down, down , down – anchoring between her ribs where they can fester safely from prying eyes.

She moves to him instantly, kneeling in the snow, the shock of cold to her knees barely registering. She reaches for his hand, curls her fingers along his. "Bran, I'm sorry. I didn't –" She stops, licks her lips. "I'm sorry." Her hand tightens over his.

Bran looks at her. Just looks at her, and then his eyes flit to the snow at his feet. "I know," he says in answer, and suddenly he is her little brother again, with his impish grin and his scabbed knees and his lying tells.

Sansa lowers her head to rest along their joined hands.

Her brother.

Her little brother.

Her last brother.

Her nails dig half moons into the tender flesh of his palm even through the gloves.

* * *

Sometimes the pain in Jon's leg is blinding and apparent, bringing him to a sudden stumble in his trek through the halls or having him grip desperately at his thigh when he sits down for a meal. Sometimes the pain is dull and barely-there, like a vague, lingering shadow, a forgotten dream that hazily haunts his waking moments.

Sometimes it doesn't hurt at all.

Sometimes, that's a lie.

* * *

Stone can be rebuilt. Snow can be plowed. Wounds can heal.

Sansa stands staring at the entrance to the crypts, her hand at her throat, fingers trembling as they tug at her chain.

Ghost's low whine beside her drags her attention back, and then she is stalking away, breath tight in her chest, shoulders quaking.

Stone can be rebuilt. Snow can be plowed. Wounds can heal. But the dead can no longer rise.

Let them rest, she tells herself.

Let them rest.

* * *

"I have given the Unsullied and the Dothraki leave to stay, should they wish."

Sansa knows he hears her, if only for the faint lift of his brow and the low hum that leaves him. He continues staring into the hearth before them as they sit in her chambers.

She takes a breath, swallows down that bite of resentment, that needless sense of possession. "I'm sorry, Jon," she says softly, and suddenly she realizes she means it. "I'm sorry she died."

He looks at her finally, mouth thinning into a frown.

"I'm sorry Daenerys died."

"I didn't love her," he says in answer, almost on reflex it seems, but the minute widening of his eyes tells her he hadn't even expected to say it himself. He stares at her, takes a breath, licks his lips. "You asked me once."

"I did." Her chest tightens, her fingers curling around themselves in her lap. "But you do not owe me an answer to that, and I was wrong to ask you."

"I didn't love her," he repeats, turning back to the flames, throat flexing beneath the weight of words she doesn't think he will ever bring to air.

"Still," she offers, because she knows the harrowing mark that guilt can leave, justified or not, "She was your aunt. She was… family."

Jon closes his eyes, shaking his head. "She wasn't pack," he says in answer, and she can't be sure whether it is regret or relief that taints his words.

Sansa doesn't speak further.

Perhaps Daenerys wasn't pack. But Sansa wonders if she could have been. If she hadn't demanded they bend the knee, if she hadn't traded Jon's fealty for her aid, if she hadn't held him prisoner all those moons, if she hadn't invited him to Dragonstone with falsities –

If she hadn't been a dragon in the first place.

Except she was, and maybe it's a truth that could have never been unwritten.

Sansa looks at Jon.

He sighs, rubbing a hand down his face. "You are the Lady of Winterfell, and guest right is yours to grant," he says finally, granting her the agreement she had sought from the start.

"You are our king, Jon," she says softly, a tender, persistent reminder, barely a whisper above the flames before them.

His brows furrow, his face pinching tight with something akin to pain, and then his face is in his hands and he heaves a long, quaking sigh, his shoulders trembling with the effort, and she can think of nothing else to say.

So she says nothing.

She keeps their quiet long into the night, until he heralds his farewell with a jarring scrape of his chair along the stone floor and a hesitant touch to her shoulder.

She lights her hand over his and doesn't protest when he slips away moments later.

* * *

The lords filter out of the hall and Sansa stands from her place at the head table, lingering in the quieting room a moment, contemplative.

Jon eyes her from his seat still, a frown of worry upon his face. "What about Cersei?" He isn't simple enough to think she has forgotten her former tormentor, her former captor.

Sansa's jaw clenches tight. "You heard the lords."

"Aye, I heard them," Jon says, standing finally himself.

Sansa continues to look out upon the now empty space of the hall, and if Jon stares long enough, he can imagine that she sees the same dark stain lighting the stones where Baelish had bled out before the Northern court.

But she gives no indication of the sort, only steeples her fingertips along the table before her, glancing down at the motion as she takes a steadying breath. "They are tired of war, wounded still, only just rebuilding."

Jon nods silently.

She taps her fingers along the wood. "The North needs to heal first."

"And then?" He wonders if it is wariness or hope that tinges the words.

Sansa glances at him out of the corner of her eye, her shoulders going rigid. She takes a moment, a dangerously long moment to Jon, her eyes shifting between his, and he thinks he may have stopped breathing entirely when she finally opens her mouth.

"Then nothing. Cersei doesn't have the forces to subjugate the North any longer. And if she tries – if she marches north, then we will be ready. We will wait her out behind these sturdy walls. We will starve her out, freeze her out. Let winter take her and her hordes." She turns away, meaning to leave the hall. A quiet dismissal.

He catches her hand and halts her before she can make it any further.

"And if she doesn't? Could you just let her be? Sansa…" He knows how she has craved Cersei's demise, how the nightmares still plague her, how any notion of her venturing to the South is shot down with a vehemence he has only ever seen once before (the night she promised never to return to Ramsay alive).

"If she doesn't," she begins, turning slightly in his hold so that she can face him, though she doesn't tug her hand from his, "then I'll have lost nothing more."

Jon's eyes widen minutely, mouth parting at the way her thumb arcs over his knuckles pointedly. He releases her hand at the subtle intimate motion, staring at her, breath pooling hot and stifling in his chest.

She keeps his gaze a while longer, and then she leaves him entirely, her skirts rustling over the stones like a winter's gale.

* * *

Sansa leaves the latest meeting of the lords with a nagging headache. Rebuilding the North is laborious and slow, but she sees the ever-growing number of shelters in Wintertown and she hears the ever-louder laughter in the kitchens and laundry room. She sees the slow progress of life beneath the snow, beneath a dead-riddled winter.

And then she comes upon her old chambers.

Sansa comes to a halt almost jarringly, her feet having taken this route practically without her consent, and it shouldn't make any sense. It shouldn't make any sense  _at_   _all_. She is safe – has been for a while now. There is no one north of the Neck that can threaten her here, in her own home. And her pack has returned. She is  _safe_.

But perhaps that is the matter at heart. Perhaps it will never make sense. Perhaps loss like this isn't supposed to.

"My lady?" Brienne asks behind her, a taut line of concern lacing her address.

Sansa's trembling hand slips from beneath her cloak in a low, subtle command, and Brienne keeps her distance, keeps her stance, when Sansa pushes the door open.

It assaults her at once, the visceral memory of Ramsay's mouth at her ear and his blade on the backs of her thighs and his bruising fingers along her spine. Her face pressed to the furs, her teeth biting down on the sheets, cry strangled in her throat.

Sansa stumbles in the threshold, eyes raking over the empty, unused space.

And then it's Theon's rattling voice beneath the stale air, his terrified, staggering steps back, his trembling face in her hands.

_"Tell me that they weren't your brothers!"_

And then his hand in hers, tugging her through an icy river, huddling her beneath a fallen oak, weeping into her shoulder –

Lying spent and bloodied upon a pyre.

(There is no sea near enough to bear him away, but she wonders if there is enough salt in her tears to beg the Drowned God to his side nonetheless.)

Sansa grips at the doorway, breath raking through her chest.

It shouldn't make any  _sense_ , it shouldn't, it –

Her skin alights with the terror once more, the scent of rotting flesh flooding her nostrils, and then it is Rickon – sweet and wild and bold Rickon – rotted with decay, chest still mottled with arrow holes, eyes too inhumanly blue to be the soft brilliance of the Tullys, and it's her dragonglass dagger shoved into his throat when he wrestles her to the ground, and his gasp of blackened bile on her cheeks before he slumps over her, dead again, and the ragged cry that breaks from her, that rends her to pieces because her brother – her  _brother_  – and he isn't sweet Rickon anymore, he isn't Rickon  _at all_  and yet – and yet –

The sob that breaks from her jars her back into the present, where she finds her hand has made its way back to her throat, her fingers curling along her chain, and her back has pressed into the threshold, the door still held ajar.

Because if these walls could talk –

"My lady?" Brienne asks once more, moving closer from her guarding stance, a hand hovering in the air above Sansa's shoulder, never alighting.

Sansa brushes her hands down her skirts, takes a deep breath, swallows back that threatening bile – sour on her tongue, rancid with disuse, and then she shuts the door behind her once more, loud and resonant in the empty hallway.

She stands breathing heavily against the shut door, throat parched, back rigid, eyes unable to lift to Brienne's.

"There is work to do," she says finally, and her voice is blessedly sure – the only part of her not breaking beneath the assault of memories.

Brienne does not question further. She follows her lady down the hall to her true chambers, and she does not leave her door that night.

Not even when she hears the crash of a chair being thrown to the floor, or an inkwell shattering against the far wall, or her lady's heavy, piercing wail reverberating off the stone.

Sansa sinks to the floor of her chambers, skirts tangling beneath her legs – a sea of wool.

Brienne enters her chambers hesitantly, slowly, beneath the dead of night.

When her lady knight's arms wind around her huddled form, Sansa finds that it is foolish to think it would ever make sense.

She lives and she breathes and she aches even still. She bears witness to her horrors each night anew.

She thinks of Jon's embrace in the courtyard of Castle Black, those many moons ago. She thinks of how his chest had heaved beneath hers, true and beating and  _alive_  – even when he claimed otherwise. She thinks of what it means to know the Long Night, and yet to brave the dawn. She thinks of how it felt to stitch closed the bloody gash along his forehead in those haunting, ethereal hours following the end, praying for him to survive ("please gods, if there is any goodness in you now, you will wake him _please,_ just _… just let him live_ ") how he had been fever-warm beneath her hands, how her teeth had cut the thread, lips braced a whisper above his skin –

How death has been their constant, their companion, their only guarantee in this world.

How they have refused it – and refuse it still.

Sansa shakes and cries and bellows her agony into Brienne's arms. She lets it to air. She lets it rip from her.

Because it will never make sense, she realizes, and it never  _should_.

Such loss, such  _keen_  loss.

Because oh, if these walls could talk –

How they would scream.

* * *

Sansa does not break her fast with them the next morning, and when Jon looks to Bran in a moment of concern, he finds his brother is already watching him.

"She hadn't meant to kill him again. She hadn't wanted to."

Jon narrows his eyes at Bran so quickly he hardly blinks. "What?" It's a coarse rush of air that leaves him.

And then Bran returns to his bread, fingers tearing at it quietly. "Rickon," he says in answer, so casually it leaves Jon light-headed. "In her nightmares, the dead keep rising."

Something settles beneath Jon's skin like a splinter, a subtle prickling of awareness too small to cut out and too sharp to soothe.

He pushes from his chair and bolts from the room, finding his way to Sansa's chambers on instinct. He barrels through Brienne's objections outside her door, and then barrels through the door itself, Sansa's name a rough desperation on his tongue.

She stands from her seat by the window where she'd been overlooking the snows, hair undone in the filtering sunlight, clad only in a shift. "Jon!" she manages, blinking in her surprise, before her arms wind around herself as though to cover her state.

Brienne huffs her indignation, moving to stand before Sansa and block Jon's view of her lady. "Your Grace, I must  _insist_  that you – "

"Why couldn't you tell me?" It breaks from him before he can even taste the words along his tongue.

Both women stare at him heatedly, Sansa's eyes wide as they peek out from behind Brienne. Her fingers wind around her knight's arm as she firmly pushes her aside.

Brienne acquiesces reluctantly, still eyeing Jon with clear disapproval.

"Tell you what?" Sansa asks warily, stepping toward him.

"Rickon. In the crypts, you – you…"

Sansa sucks a breath through her teeth like a brand.

They stand there staring at each other for long moments and then –

"Brienne, step outside."

"But my lady…"

"It's alright."

Jon doesn't even register the knight's exit, or her censuring gaze, her deep frown. He doesn't even register the click of the door behind him. All he can think of is how often he's seen Sansa staring at the entrance to the crypts lately, never venturing in, a vacant, eerily-still look to her face. And how Ghost accompanies her to the godswood so much more now. And how she embroiders handkerchiefs with black, wild wolves. How she pushes the plate of lemon cakes unobtrusively away at dinner, a glaring remembrance of how little Rickon used to steal them from her plate suddenly unavoidable in his mind.

Suddenly, it makes such glaring, obvious sense as to flood him with shame. The kind of shame that doesn't wash out.

"Sansa – "

"Your lessons proved their worth. My blade did not miss." She twists her hands before her, unmindful of her thin apparel or the cold, morning breeze drifting through the still open window behind her.

"Oh, Sansa," he croaks, because he can say nothing more.

_Why couldn't you tell me?_

It isn't so much a demand of her as it is a disgrace upon him. Because  _why couldn't he ask?_

It's easy to pretend all the dead were laid to rest that night. It's easy to pretend the faces of their haunts aren't familiar. It's easy to pretend the living won in the end.

(It's not so easy to pretend that 'surviving' is the same thing as 'living' anymore.)

"Was he always so tall?" she asks tremulously, brows furrowed in disbelief, a hesitant, quaking laugh leaving her. Her eyes are already dangerously wet.

The question throws him and he moves to step toward her, unsure.

She rubs a hand at her nose, sniffling behind her knuckles, and then the laugh escapes her again, delirium and terror in equal measure. "I don't remember." Her face falls, her tears with it, shoulders shaking. She reaches for him. "Oh  _gods_ , Jon, I don't  _remember_!" Her cry of self-chastisement and incredulity is smothered in his shoulder when he makes it to her, arms wrapping around her trembling frame, pulling her tight to his chest.

"Shh, Sansa, it's okay."

Her fists bunch against his chest. "It's not." She draws a tight breath in, catches it along her tongue. "It's  _not_ , it's not, it's… I don't remember, Jon, and I  _should_ , I have to, because – because he's our brother. Our  _little brother_ , Jon, oh gods, and I – I didn't –  _I want to remember!_ "

She crumples against him, sagging to the floor. He falls with her, knees hitting the stone in a painful thud, but he keeps his arms around her, keeps his cheek pressed to hers, his soft shushing sounds at her ear, and he knows it will never –  _can never_  – be enough.

He fumbles for her face, holds her reddened cheeks between his calloused palms, urges her gaze to his. "Sansa."

A promise, a plea, a prayer.

She shakes her head, the tears hot on her lids, and something twists unnaturally inside him. Just the sight of her. Just the rending, aching knowledge that surviving will  _never_  mean living, and damn him, but he wants her to live.

And maybe more importantly, he wants to live  _with her_.

He presses his chapped lips to her cheek, tastes the salt of her tears, doesn't flinch from her stifled gasp. "I'm sorry, I'm  _so_   _sorry_ , Sansa. Sansa, please," he whispers against her skin, and then it really is a prayer. Another press of his lips to her closed eyes. "Sansa, Sansa, Sansa."

Her breath goes still, her fingers curling against his tunic.

His lips find her forehead, and the sharp line of her jaw, and the corner of her mouth – desperate and quick and flooded with unexplainable yearning.

"Jon."

(His name on her lips – the kind of answer his prayer has always sought.)

He kisses her.

Terrified and needful and incredibly,  _disappointingly_  quick – before he releases her lips and finds her cheek again, drags his lips across her cheekbone and then against her ear and the clutch of air he holds in his lungs is so unbearably tight, so near exploding, that all he can do is hold his tongue between his teeth and hope for blood.

But she isn't crying anymore. She isn't shaking.

And Jon finds that the space between their chests is practically nonexistent at this point, the way his hands wind into her hair entirely inappropriate, and his own disregard for such improper intimacy far too heady to be brotherly.

In the end, he finds he doesn't care.

Not when she holds him just as surely.

Not when she buries her nose in the furs at his throat and sighs in his secure embrace.

Not when the prayer of her name still clatters around his skull like a howl.

* * *

She comes to his bed that evening, slips beneath the furs and sidles up to his back before he can shake the grogginess of sleep from his mind quick enough to notice her entrance.

"Sansa, what are you – "

"I don't want to be alone."

It isn't the first she's slipped beneath his covers. They've shared a bed at Castle Black, when her nightmares drove her to familiar warmth, when the night was too dark and too lonesome and too quiet for solitude.

(When she was still his sister.)

He should turn her away, he knows. But he says nothing when she rests her head at the space between his shoulder blades, when she winds an arm around his waist, when her cold feet press against his.

Jon closes his eyes and steadies himself.

"I don't want to be alone," she repeats, the threat of tears lining her broken voice.

"You're not," he whispers back, because he means it, has always meant it.

Enough to curl his palm around hers at his stomach.

Enough to hold her there until dawn.

(And then even longer. And then – )

Their fingers thread together like stitches.

Jon begins to understand that ruined flesh and ruined hearts take time to mend all the same.


	2. What Pains Them Still

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Sansa reminds herself that Jon’s bed has never harbored nightmares. His embrace has never bred monsters.” - Jon and Sansa, Season 8 AU. After the Battle of Winterfell, the mending begins in earnest.

Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Wool and Tallow

Chapter Two: What Pains Them Still

" _Sansa reminds herself that Jon's bed has never harbored nightmares. His embrace has never bred monsters."_  - Jon and Sansa, Season 8 AU. After the Battle of Winterfell, the mending begins in earnest.

* * *

They share a bed every night – his mostly. Because he is not thoughtless enough to add to the rumors with a late-night visit to her chambers, but he is also not resilient enough to latch his chamber door shut to her. He can't. He won't. And every night, when she silently climbs into bed with him, he turns his back to her, lets her bury her face in the soft linen of his tunic, lets her wrap him in her warmth, never meeting his eyes, because he understands why she can't look at him beneath the condemning shadows of night. He knows why she needs this embrace. He knows why she still needs him to be her brother.

Even when he is not.

Even when he never wants to be again.

* * *

Perhaps she's become too accustomed to entering his chambers without an invitation. Perhaps she's become too comfortable with this unspoken intimacy. Because when she opens his door mid-afternoon, Jon is sitting on the edge of his bed, breeches off, clad only in his smallclothes and a thin tunic, reaching for a salve on the bedside table next to him.

He stills, blinking at her.

She sucks a breath through her teeth, halting in the threshold, casting a stiff shadow through the open doorframe.

" _Seven hells_ , Sansa, the door!"

She releases the knob instantly, as though burned, stepping away from it and further into the room.

"I meant close it!"

"Oh." She walks back to it, stiltedly, shutting it with a deep breath before she turns back to see he's dragged the bedsheet across his legs.

"I meant with you  _behind_  it!"

"Oh," she repeats, backing toward it, gaze shifting frantically through the room for something else to focus on beside his half-undressed form, hand fumbling for the handle behind her. And then she stops.

Jon looks at her with raised brows, a comically desperate look gracing his features when she turns her gaze back to his, and suddenly she can't hold back the laughter.

It breaks from her in a wave of unexpected release, her hand flying to her mouth to smother the sound.

Jon stares at her, shoulders tight with tension, and then he blinks, and then he sighs, and then he's laughing with her, head bent to cover his face, his pink-tinged cheeks and his disbelieving grin.

Sansa braces back against the door, one hand still clutching the door handle, the other smothering her chuckles as she watches his shoulders shake with his mirth, even when he doesn't meet her eyes.

They stay like this for many moments, both trying to settle the laughter in their gut, and then silence pervades the room once more, a steady stillness that keeps them in their places as Jon raises his head to lock eyes with her.

She makes no move to leave the room.

(This is her first mistake. It is also her last.)

"Sansa," he begins, face softening, running a hand through his unkempt hair.

"Do you need help?"

Jon's mouth clamps closed, his throat flexing beneath his swallow.

Sansa takes a breath, licks her lips. She pushes from the door, hands settling in a tentative grip before her as she walks toward him, eyes glancing to the salve on his bedside table with meaning.

Jon looks at the jar, hand clenching the sheet over his lap tighter.

She gives him a moment, only a moment, and then she's reaching for the jar herself, turning it in her hands to get a better look. "Your leg still pains you?"

Jon only nods, watching her hesitantly.

She purses her lips in thought, fingers running over the smooth lid, her teeth clenching behind her cheek.

The thing is, she already knows what still pains him. She always has.

His leg is the least of it. His heart is the most of it.

Sansa remembers the morning after. She remembers the infinite dawn, the thread of light through blood-flecked snow, the promise of sun in the wake of a long,  _long_  night. Sansa remembers searching for him, running through the dark, stone all around her, panting his name in the cold air – his  _name_  – breaking from the ash-filled crypts with Rickon's black bile still staining her cheeks, her hair undone and ragged, dragonglass dagger still clutched in her palm, the hilt cutting into her skin with the way she shook, the way she gripped it with all of her, with the last of her, with everything she was certain to have lost in the night, in the deadly, cold night that took them and never truly let go.

She remembers stumbling into the courtyard and finally catching sight of him, watching as he staggered through the gate with the other men, limping, bleeding, hand gripping at his thigh, a coat of ash already lining his skin, and then his stumble, the way he dropped to his knees against the snow-littered stone, the way his whole body seemed to be a question, a yearning, a desperate plead with the morning light – give them light, give them light,  _please_   _gods_ , just give them light! – and how the dawn arched over his shoulders in answer, a soft orange-hued illumination silhouetting his form and then his eyes (his  _eyes_ , ever searching for hers), blinking beneath the blood flooding down from his temple, everything said in that one glance, in that one moment of grief and mourning and quiet, unspeakable regret. And then the quick, trembling lilt of his lips in what would stand for a smile in any other light, in any other dawn – except that such a dawn means only one thing, means only loss, hard-won and deserved as it is. And then the way his eyes rolled back into his head and how he fell to the snow unconscious and how he didn't wake up until two days later, smothered in her furs, her stitches lining his brow, her hands bloodied with the remembrance of Northern soldiers, her heart laying slaughtered in the crypts, her faith – that endless, unbroken faith – slumbering beside her cousin (her  _cousin_ , Bran had told her, when Jon was still laying unconscious in her bed, as though it should mean something, and it does, it  _does_  mean something, it means more than 'something'.)

Yes, Sansa knows what pains him.

Perhaps because it pains her, too.

"Let me help," she manages in a rough whisper, clearing her throat in hopes of clearing her apprehension. She doesn't give herself a chance to regret it, doesn't give  _him_  a chance to refute it. She reaches for the sheet and pulls it aside, revealing his scarred thigh.

He lets her, unable to speak, unable to do much but look at her, something passing over his features she will not be able to name for many years.

She rests the sheet over his unwounded thigh and most of his lap, letting him keep his modesty while still baring the wounded expanse of his thigh to her gaze. She settles to her knees in the space between his legs, eyes locked on the red, swollen skin of his thigh.

Jon sucks a sharp breath between his teeth, stiff as he watches her.

"Let me help," she repeats, eyes finally lifting to his.

She's surprised to find his eyes wet, the moisture gathering at the corners, his brow drawn taut over unblinking eyes. He looks pained. The kind of pained she wants to kiss away.

Sansa startles at the realization.

Jon nods at her, slowly, evenly, eyes never breaking from hers.

(Not leaving the room was her last mistake because she can never call what follows a mistake. She can never call  _this_  a mistake.)

Sansa dips her fingers into the salve and sets to soothing the ache.

Jon never takes his eyes from her.

* * *

Arya watches Sansa from her place across the desk, cleaning her Valyrian blade. Sansa glances at her through the candlelit shadows, setting a ledger to her desk. "What?" she asks her sister.

Arya simply raises a brow, lips pursed in thought.

Sansa gives her her full attention, leaning back in her chair, tapping her quill lightly against the parchment. "You're being eerily quiet again. You're being… strange."

"I thought you liked quiet."

"Not from you," she scoffs in fondness, the lilt of her smile a far easier thing than she once thought possible with her younger sister.

Arya doesn't share her smile, only looks at her with that same sort of strange query in her eyes. "You weren't in your rooms last night."

Sansa's fingers tighten over the quill in her hand. "No, I wasn't."

Arya nods, turning back to her dagger, a foreign kind of tenderness to the wipe of her oiled rag along the blade, stiff as it is. "Your nightmares are back?"

Sansa opens her mouth, and then promptly closes it, chest rising steadily in her nervousness.

Arya doesn't press her further, instead, focusing on the cleaning of her blade. The candles flicker uneasily atop the desk separating them.

Sansa looks down to her ledgers. "They never left," she finally answers, but it is a half-truth.

Her nightmares have long since stopped being the work of dark nights and restless sleep. Her nightmares have tasted daylight, been brought to air, lived a thousand lives in her captors' skins and her dead brother's visage and even in her own mirror.

She has long since grown accustomed to simply  _living_  her nightmares.

(The half-truth of this is that she shouldn't rightly expect any kind of reprieve. But the half-lie is that her visits to Jon's bed are only for such.)

"Be careful you don't become them," Arya whispers, a taut line of reproach hidden beneath the concern. "Your nightmares," she finishes pointedly.

Sansa draws a deep, lingering breath in – lets it fill her with all the resentment and indignation and guilt such words should draw from her.

And then she watches the way Arya stares fixedly at her hands, at the way her mouth draws into a tight line.

She looks away, eyes fixed to the waning candle beside her clenched fist. "We need more tallow," she manages through clenched teeth, quill returning to her parchment – another nock on the ledgers.

Sansa still goes to Jon that night, but when he moves to give her his back, as he always does, providing that precarious smokescreen between them she'd always thought she'd need to embrace him like this, she instead stills his turn with a fist in his tunic, tugging him back to face her.

Jon stares at her wide-eyed, hot breath fanning her cheeks, chest heaving beneath her steady stare.

She winds her arm around his waist and pulls herself up against his chest, burying her face in his neck.

His hand hovers hesitantly over her form as he swallows thickly, eyes shifting frantically in the dark. But at the contented sigh she releases against his throat, his hand finds its place easily, settling along her waist before sliding gently up her back and anchoring at the nape of her neck.

Sansa reminds herself that Jon's bed has never harbored nightmares. His embrace has never bred monsters.

She is not her fear. She is not her scars. But when she awakens to Jon's open mouth pressed to her collarbone in his sleep, and his hand fisted in her shift, and his thigh wedged adamantly between hers –

She finds that she is very much his.

* * *

Jon takes to hunting with Arya. He's not as good with a bow as she, but somehow this is more comforting than anything. She beckons him on, skirting through the grey trees, her light footsteps barely denting the dense snow, silent as shadow, swift as wolves.

He thinks his hands may never unlearn how to hold a weapon, and so he follows, but in his still-healing, scar-riddled form, he feels cumbersome in Arya's wake, his heavy cloak catching along the low snow-thatched branches.

(He hasn't the heart to remove it, not when Sansa's stitch lingers along the collar, her touch sewn into the fur, her hand at his shoulders.)

Even still, he smiles when he watches Arya dash ahead after a hare. He braces a hand along a tree to steady himself, breathing heavily, and the bark splinters beneath his gloves. He pulls his touch back and his hand comes away grey and dusted.

Soot and snow.

Jon glances up at the canopy, watches the flakes of ash filtering down through the trees, mingling with the snow.

Fire cannot snuff winter for long, Jon knows this. Not even dragonfire.

A soft, hesitant smile tugs at his lips.

He can see the sky through the ash-lined branches – clear and white and crisp.

Arya calls him on and Jon finds it is not so heavy a load as it was before. Soot doesn't linger long on true Northern furs, after all, and Sansa has sewn him nothing but the finest.

* * *

Jon drops the dead stag atop the kitchen table, startling Sansa with the loud thud.

Arya smirks beside her brother, arms crossed. "Enough to fill those stores you're so worried about?"

Sansa retracts the hand braced over her chest from her surprise, blinking at her sister, before realization breaks over her and she barely checks the urge to roll her eyes at Arya, chuffing a sigh instead. "Hardly."

Arya piques a mildly annoyed brow.

Sansa lifts her chin, hands retreating behind her back in her usual stance. "Get me two dozen more and then we'll talk."

Jon doesn't bother to hide his grin at Sansa.

Arya huffs her exasperation, whisking out her dagger and burying it in the stag's shoulder with a quickness that has Sansa jolting before the table. Arya laughs at the jump. "Still so demanding, I see," she remarks, a sly grin tugging at her lips, her fingers flexing over the hilt of her dagger.

Sansa purses her lips. "And you're still so… brutish, I see," she teases without malice.

Jon barks a laugh, silencing it immediately when Arya flicks a dangerous look his way. He shakes his head, unable to hide his mirth. "Come on, little sister, time for another hunt."

She lets him drag her off unceremoniously. "You were hardly any help on the last one!' she reminds him, pulling her dagger free from the meat atop the table.

Sansa watches them leave the kitchens with a smile breaking over her face, her chuckle locked behind her lips. She clears her throat and summons the cooks.

Winterfell eats well that night, and when Jon's knuckles brush against hers as he reaches for his mug of ale, Sansa doesn't bother to retract her hand.

He glances at her, face soft and warm and everything this winter is not, before he looks away, sharing a cup with Tormund, hand settled on the table dangerously close to hers.

She does not see the way Arya purposely looks away from them, and for the moment, Sansa remembers warmth, for she is home – with stew at her table and Jon at her side and an uproarious, joyful North filling their halls.

The stain that was Littlefinger sits unseen beneath one of the longtables, and Sansa forgets for a time the words that have haunted her for so long.

_"What do you want that you do not have?"_

Jon does not take her hand, no, but it is of little consequence. He still keeps his door unlocked. He still holds her in the night.

It should be enough, she thinks.

Sansa stares down at his hand. So woefully far, so inexplicably close.

It should be enough.

(It isn't.)

* * *

Sansa catches sight of the cloak Jon throws over his shoulders. "You still wear it," she says softly, as though in afterthought.

As though it could ever be an afterthought.

He doesn't meet her eyes, but his are warm nonetheless. It is impossible not to notice.

"Aye," he answers, and she flushes with fondness, chest tightening.

When he finally looks up at her, it's with a sheepish sort of affection that makes her step toward him, hands reaching for his chest. He stills beneath her touch as she adjusts the straps, tugging them into place, fingers spreading over his jerkin with surety.

"There," she says, gaze bright with her satisfaction.

His eyes flick to her mouth for a moment, before making it to her eyes. "There," he murmurs in agreement.

There.

Right there.

Right there from the start – blatant and glaring and  _almost_  between them.

They part reluctantly, reconciled with the distance.

(But there is nothing reconcilable about such parting.)

* * *

Meera Reed shows up at Winterfell one day with her father.

Howland Reed eyes Jon with a flicker of tenderness in his gaze, some long-lost fondness too unspeakable in the wake of his ever-present grief. "Your father would be proud of you," he says, hand clapping over Jon's shoulder. And then he nods his deference, a knowing smirk lighting his lips. "Your Grace."

It goes unspoken which 'father' he means.

It has always been Ned Stark. It will always  _be_  Ned Stark.

And so Jon swallows back his questions, knows there is time yet for them. Instead he watches Bran, notices the subtle tightening of his fingers along his armrests at the sight of Meera. The young woman barely looks at his brother.

Later, at the welcoming feast, Jon leans over the arm of his chair to question Bran. "Won't you speak to her?"

Bran's eyes linger over Meera's form as she chats with Arya and Tormund across the room.

"What would I tell her?" he asks, and it's such an earnest question that Jon thinks he hears his little brother somewhere in the words.

Jon takes a gulp of ale. "Anything." He pauses, glances to the table on the far left of the hall where Sansa sits sharing a glass with Sers Podrick and Brienne. "Everything," he adds, throat thick with longing.

"She wouldn't be interested," Bran refutes softly, eyes drifting to the table. His plate sits untouched. "I'm not who I once was."

"None of us are." Jon's eyes stay fixed to Sansa.

There is silence between them for long moments, and then Jon hears the shift of Bran's furs beside him. "Some of us are."

Jon snaps his gaze back to his brother, finds his eyes following Sansa as well.

It awakens something in Jon that never truly leaves him.

"Take me to the godswood, cousin?" Bran asks, a heavy sigh leaving him as he offers a barely-there smile, his back straight, fingers no longer gripping his armrest.

Jon watches him a moment, and then nods quietly, setting his mug of ale down.

Sometime between the gate and the weirwood, sometime between the first and last fall of snow that evening, Jon understands how to reconcile the Sansa of his childhood with the one who shares his bed now.

She has never stopped looking for heroes.

Jon presses a gloved hand to the now-healed gash along his forehead, remembering the steady thread of her stitches even in his feverish sleep. He remembers the way the embroidered wolf along her chest had shown in the light atop the hill overlooking the Battle of the Bastards, and he remembers the way the Northern lords looked to her in the hall and bellowed their allegiance, and he remembers the way she slid her direwolf pin into Theon's bloodied tunic and sent him away as much a Stark as he was a Greyjoy.

Jon comes to a halt in the center of the godswood, gripping the handles of Bran's chair tightly in the frigid air, the weirwood's shade arcing red and shadowy above them.

No, Sansa has never stopped looking for heroes, even when she crawled into his bed that first night at Castle Black – and when they were children, had he only taken the time to learn, he could have told her to stop looking.

She's always been one herself.

* * *

"Does it hurt still?" she asks one night, fingers grazing his scarred thigh through the fabric of his breeches.

He hisses at the contact, grabbing for her hand.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, head ducking down slightly, chin to her chest.

Jon closes his eyes and breathes deep, tries to ignore the warmth of her beside him, their heads sharing the same pillow, her hand caught in his, dangerously close to his groin, because it isn't pain that has him jolting beneath her touch.

"It's… it's alright, Sansa, it's just…" His eyes flicker back open in time to see her lifting her gaze hesitantly.

"What?"

He swallows tightly, releasing her hand. He almost wishes she would place it back on his thigh, but it's an abhorrent wish, he knows, and he nearly breathes a sigh of relief when she instead bundles her hands together beneath her chin, even as she scoots closer to him beneath the furs. "What is it, Jon?"

He pulls back slightly, keeping the space between them.

Her brows furrow at the motion.

This has only lasted so long because they never speak of it. It's a silent oath they take the moment she pulls the furs back, vanishing with the dawn, with the image of her back retreating through his door when he pretends to be asleep still.

"This isn't… " He stops, tries to collect his thoughts. "You can't touch me like that."

She doesn't answer for long moments, simply watches him. And then, quietly, "Why?"

He shifts uncomfortably beneath the covers, suddenly very aware of her legs tangled in his. "It isn't… proper."

"If you were worried about 'proper' you should have turned me away from the start."

"Sansa – "

"But you won't." She stares determinedly at him, hands unbundling from beneath her chin. She reaches out one palm to press against his chest.

Jon sucks in a sharp breath, teeth clenching. "That isn't fair, Sansa."

"Maybe so. But it's right."

Jon releases a ragged sigh, the weight of it crushing his chest, trembling beneath her touch. "And what if it isn't?" The words are almost broken, and he has to shut his eyes to the tear-laced exhale that leaves him.

He hadn't meant… he hadn't meant for this. Maybe somewhere along the way, but not… not at the start. Not when she was simply Sansa and he was simply Jon and they were simply siblings. Not when the comfort of her arm around his waist became anything more than sisterly and definitely  _not_  when she first sighed against his throat and clutched him in her sleep, breasts flattening against his chest, hand resting dangerously over his hip, his morning hardness the kind of sin that should send him reeling from the bed but instead only had him rocking back into her, dreams flooding with her scent.

"What if it isn't right?" he asks her again, his traitorous body pressing closer, jaw clenching over the quake in his words

Sansa tilts her chin up so that her mouth is braced a breath's span away from his. "Then perhaps I don't want what's 'right'," she whispers against his lips, hand slinking down his chest, further, further still.

Jon's chest heaves, the breath raking from him, unable to keep the thrumming moan from broaching his lips, and then Sansa leans in, smelling of wool and tallow and the kind of dreams he is damned for, surely.

"Kiss me," she whispers against his mouth, and it takes all of Jon not to.

Instead, he pushes her back at the shoulder, steadying himself, his jaw clenching painfully tight, and when her soft gasp breaks against his mouth he has to pull entirely from her, throwing the furs back and sitting up, legs swinging over the edge of the bed. He stops then, breathing raggedly, back to her.

"You've kissed me before," she reminds him quietly from somewhere behind him. It makes him curl his fists in the furs.

"A mistake."

He doesn't have to see her to recognize the way she recoils – it's in the stilted air, in the salt-tinge lining both their eyes.

Yes, a mistake. Because he sees the way Arya eyes him with unspoken suspicion nowadays, and the way Bran pointedly keeps his silence, and the way Brienne fails to hide her disappointment behind her deference. He isn't Sansa's brother, no, but he may as well still be for all the outcry and distaste their union would bring. And he will not splinter the pack. He will not be the one to fail her this time.

Because what is right? Surely not this, not when he dreams in copper and drowns in wool and burns like tallow. Not when he is worn down to the wick with a grief and a longing he is too selfish to want to bear alone and it  _shouldn't_  be her. It should never be her.

(He thinks of their stone father still lining the darkened, abandoned crypts. He thinks of every Stark gaze from millennium past harrowing into him with their condemnation.)

She has always been his lady sister, even when she wasn't, and he can never want for more.

Bastards learn early to bury their desires, and he is – he well and truly is a bastard, because – blood or not – only bastards could crave like this.

Could love like this.

"Jon."

"You should leave."

Silence. Barely even the rustle of furs behind him. But he will not look at her.

"Are you asking me to leave, Jon?" she whispers, deadly calm, at his back.

Yes, and no. And yes. And… gods, does she even know? Does she even know how he would take her, right then, and never look back? Does she know what she tempts when she commands him so.

_"Kiss me."_

Oh, but he would do more than that. He would ruin her, he knows.

"Please… I can't…" He does not need to say more, because suddenly the bed dips beneath her shifted weight, the sound of rustling furs loud in his silent chamber, and then the door opens and shuts without any warning at all.

After many long moments, he finally turns to glance behind him.

He should have known she'd be gone.

But he could not know the pain such loss would render.

* * *

Sansa holds a hand out to catch the snow. It melts instantly in her palm, her gloves slick with the wetness.

She tucks her hand back beneath her cloak, looking up at the shade of the weirwood.

She loves him, she realizes – instantly and irrevocably and brutally.

She loves him.

Sansa closes her eyes to the frigid air. The snow never stops falling.


	3. Be Brave With Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Jon swipes a gentle thumb along the inside of her wrist, smoothing along the place his mouth had been, eyes never leaving the motion. ‘Because if I’m to have you, Sansa, it will be for life.’” - Jon and Sansa, Season 8 AU. After the Battle of Winterfell, the mending begins in earnest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all your support throughout this little fic! This is the final installment in this Season 8 AU. I hope you don't mind that this last chapter is exceptionally longer than the first two. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Wool and Tallow

Chapter Three: Be Brave With Me

" _Jon swipes a gentle thumb along the inside of her wrist, smoothing along the place his mouth had been, eyes never leaving the motion. 'Because if I'm to have you, Sansa, it will be for life.'"_ \- Jon and Sansa, Season 8 AU. After the Battle of Winterfell, the mending begins in earnest.

* * *

She gives no indication that his spurning of her affections has wounded her. In their meetings with the lords, she is all grace and etiquette and fine-tuned manners. A tender smile here, a touch to the wrist there. Nothing inappropriate, but also nothing telling. She is his sister again, or his cousin – he can't be sure which anymore – and they go on as King in the North and Lady of Winterfell as though his bed isn't burning with her absence even now.

As though he doesn't hold his pillow to his nose and inhale her waning scent each morning. As though he hasn't already named her Queen in the dark corners of his heart. As though he doesn't trail her woolen skirts through the halls, eclipsed in shadows too familiar to be anything but shameful.

"Was there anything else, Your Grace?" Sansa asks, turning to find him already staring at her.

She shifts slightly in her chair, glancing at the lords seated before them out of the corner of her eye. Her mouth thins into a fine line.

"No," he bites out, throat flexing with his control.

But her eyes are cool, and her hand is too far for him to hold, and when she stands, he can do nothing but watch her leave the hall, stiff and brittle and winter-laced once more.

* * *

Sansa takes to the godswood with Bran whenever she can. In the presence of his milk-white eyes, she can escape for a few moments, breathe deep the calming cold.

Bit by bit, the North rebuilds. And Cersei stays adamantly South. Their sovereignty has not yet been threatened, and all Sansa can ask for is an endless winter. A harrowing drought of summer to keep the Southron monsters at bay. Let them wither in the winds. Let them beat their hearts with frostbitten fists. Let them perish in their sun-built keeps and their blood-drenched thrones when winter comes harking at their door.

For she will stay with the North.

Ghost creeps along the edge of her vision, nosing the snow, padding around the banks of the clearing, never following her in. She sighs, feels the ache settle on her bones. He senses her ire and heartache around Jon and does not broach her boundaries. It makes the sob sudden and unexpected in her throat.

"You don't want to be here," Bran says abruptly, eyes no longer milk-white, face no longer tipped toward the wind.

Sansa blinks at his words, hands bunching in her lap when she turns to him. "What?"

Bran looks at her for a moment, and she can't be sure what he sees. What he's  _seen_.

_And you were so beautiful – in your white wedding dress._

Her skin is suddenly prickling, her collar too tight, her furs too warm.

He is her brother, she reminds herself. Her  _brother_. And she is tired of losing brothers.

"You don't want to be here, Sansa. Not really," he repeats, voice like something she's never heard before, not like Bran, not like pack. It's a raven's voice – a resonant calls of words more past than present, more wind than woe, more other than  _his_. "You simply want to be  _not there_. With him."

Sansa's throat tightens, her words laying slaughtered behind her clenched teeth.

Bran is looking past her toward a grey-shadowed Winterfell.

She will not turn.

(He is her  _brother_ , always will be – as much as the one whose throat she severed with her dragonglass dagger.)

"Bran," she whispers, closing her eyes to steady the tears at her lids.

"I will not be your excuse. I cannot be."

Her eyes snap open, and there – amidst the snow and the red shade and the thin film of wetness lining her eyes, she catches sight of familiar eyes – that gaze so like their mother's, so clear and unbending and willful.

Some part of him, some part of  _her_ , still lingering in the aftermath. Still clawing back through the dark.

She dips her head down, ashamed, lost, wounded.

(She still aches for Jon in the night, but she will not visit his bed, not now, not like this.)

And Bran. Lovely, lonely, somber Bran.

What he's  _seen_. Who he's been. Who he is no longer.

Sansa gulps back the bile, rising to her feet. She looks down at Bran – at the Three-Eyed-Raven – and pulls her shoulders back, nodding her farewell.

She doesn't know exactly when they lost him, but she doesn't think it matters, in the end.

Sansa turns to leave the godswood.

(She is just so tired of losing brothers.)

Ghost picks his head up at her slow trudge through the snow, padding restlessly at the frost-laden ground, still hovering around the edges of the clearing.

Her chest constricts at the distance between them. "Here, boy," she entreats, hand waving him over.

He comes dutifully, nuzzling against her thigh, red eyes slipping closed with a contented huff.

She buries a gloved hand in his fur.

She will stay with the North, yes, because it will always stay with her –

Not like her brothers.

* * *

"You're not ready yet, Little Crow," Tormund says, a furrow to his brow, hands hanging limp at his side where he grips his sparring sword.

Jon tightens his fingers around the hilt of his own sparring sword. "I'm more than ready."

Tormund huffs his exasperation, flicking his sword in a half-hearted swing toward Jon.

He parries it easily, anger lining his features. "Come on."

Tormund frowns, shifting his stance. Another swing, another parry, and just a swift flick of the wildling's wrist, a quick slap of his blunted sword along Jon's thigh – his scarred thigh – and Jon buckles at the knees, stumbling back out of reach.

Tormund settles back into a relaxed stance, lowering his sword. "You're not ready," he repeats, more regret than anything.

But all Jon can see is red. A red dawn. Red hair along his pillow. The red inviting warmth of Sansa's mouth. Sansa's  _mouth_  – that cutting, dangerous thing. And it lights his bones, fills him with vehemence. "Come  _on_ ," he urges, voice rising, hands curling tight around his sword as he steps toward Tormund once more.

The larger man shakes his head in warning. "Stubborn cunt."

But Jon has never taken well to warnings.

He swings at Tormund, arms trembling with the force of the parry. A half-step forward. Another swing. The sharp clack of swords reverberating in the empty courtyard. " _Come on_ ," he hisses, righteous and furious and lost. So lost he can't recall her scent anymore. Can't feel her warmth in the barren furs of his bed. Can't recognize the cold cut of blue she sends his way when he calls her name – softly, tenderly, with an ache of loss he doesn't think he deserves to voice.

"Come on!" he bellows, roar echoing in the courtyard.

Tormund knocks his sword away, the force of it whipping Jon into a sharp pivot, the angle causing a lance of pain to shoot up his thigh and force him to his knees with a blunted cry, his brow already sweat-lined. He drops his hands to the stone, holding himself up on all fours, bracing his weight, panting, waiting,  _burning_.

And then Tormund is crouching at his side, hands hanging limply over his knees, sparring sword forgotten. The older man sighs, rubs a hand down his face and along his beard. "You can't rush these things, Little Crow."

Jon slams a fist into the ground beneath him, never minding the split of skin along his knuckles, the sharp crack of bone along the stone. "Fuck," he murmurs, eyes clenched tightly, his head dipping down until his forehead is braced against the stone. "Fuck!"

"Jon," Tormund urges, hands still resting unsure over his knees, lips pursed into a tight frown.

Jon doesn't notice the blood seeping between his knuckles.

In another world, another time, she might have mended it.

But she has done what mending she could, and he has done nothing but rend the seams.

He lets it bleed. Scars have never been unfamiliar, after all.

* * *

"Sansa doesn't sing anymore."

Jon stops his spoon halfway to his mouth, eyeing Arya beside him.

She lifts her chin, raising an expectant brow.

Jon sets his spoon down into his bowl of stew, sighing as he leans back into his chair. He pinches the bridge of his nose, unable to look at her.

The thing is, he remembers what Sansa's song used to sound like. It was summer-warm, always.

"I don't like it," Arya says so softly he almost misses it.

Jon blinks his eyes open to look at her, his hand falling to his lap, but she's staring down at her own bowl now, hands resting uselessly along the table beside it.

Arya's throat flexes in the quiet following her words, eyes fixed to her bowl. He wonders, suddenly, what faces she's worn, what skins she's donned.

(How he can see her so clearly now – now when simply 'a girl' is everything she is  _not_.)

Jon knows her well enough to recognize longing. He likes to pretend he doesn't see it when she shares glances with Gendry across the forge or the Hall of Lords or the fucking  _dinner table_  even, but here's the truth:

He knows how longing looks in her Stark grey eyes because he's seen it in the mirror too often not to, and maybe that's the kind of truth he should have noticed long ago.

Except truth has never gotten their family anything but severed heads and lonely beds.

(The truth is he's afraid – but that's too easy and too hard all at once and he doesn't know how to form the words in the first place.)

"Hey," Jon whispers, a hand moving to brace along the back of her neck, rubbing comfortingly.

He pretends not to feel the way her shoulders stiffen in response.

"I don't like it," she says again, brows furrowing, voice quaking, and suddenly he's reminded how very  _young_  she is. His little sister.

Arya pushes from the table, standing stiffly.

Jon blinks up at her, his hand falling away.

She turns dark, uncertain eyes on him. " _Do_  something about it," she tells him hoarsely, and then she's stalking from the room, a hand at her eyes, face a blank visage once more, and he thinks he would give anything to have her wail at him, scream at him,  _anything_.

Jon braces his face in his hands and sighs with his whole body.

The truth is he's afraid.

The truth is –

* * *

"I don't know how to stop making the wrong choices."

Sansa whips around at his voice, eyes widening when she realizes she never heard him enter her chambers in the first place. "Jon, you can't just – "

"And I'm  _sorry_ ," he tells her, stepping further into the room. "I'm so,  _so_  sorry, and I don't… I don't know how we got to this point and I don't know how to get us back and I don't… I can't…" He stops, gulps back the words, shakes his head in a kind of desperation so keen and so desolate that it bleeds into the air around them, whispering into even the shadows, rattling the dust in the corners of her room so that they are each flooded with it, tainted with it, lungs alight with it.

Sansa opens her mouth to speak but nothing comes.

He steps closer, eyes pleading, face a dark reminder of everything they've lost (so like her father, so good and forthright and  _foolish_ ). She sucks a breath through her teeth at his proximity, a trembling palm rising into the air to stop his advance.

He stills three paces from her, hands bunching into fists at his sides, uncertain. Curling and uncurling, flexing with that sharp desperation.

"Why are you here, Jon?" she asks quietly, evenly.

He takes a moment to look at her, just to look at her, and she hates that she loves him still, even now – even now when she still wears the bruises around her heart, ribs still aching from the weight.

Jon purses his lips, hesitant, and he is suddenly so brittle in her eyes, so worn and old, and  _gods_  what has this world done to them? What have they done to themselves?

"I brought Daenerys into our home. Into our  _home_ , Sansa."

She blinks at his words, unsure why he means to start the conversation here of all places.

"A place you were supposed to feel safe, and I let another threat walk right through the gates."

Sansa swallows tightly, folding her hands behind her back in some small measure of comfort. "You did it for the war – we've been over this. I… I've looked past that."

Jon shakes his head. "And if she had survived? If she had demanded I make good on our deal and ride South with her?"

"She didn't."

"If she did," he demands, heaving a single exasperated breath, eyes forceful even beneath the wet sheen now lining them.

"She  _didn't_. And it's pointless to argue the fact."

"I gave away what wasn't mine to give." He's still shaking his head, still trying to reign in his breathing.

"You treated with allies for their aid."

"I bent the knee."

"You  _saved_  us."

"I slept with her!" he shouts, the breath raking from him with the explosion, mouth clamping shut when the words hit air.

Sansa's hands stiffen reflexively behind her back, her throat tightening, eyes blinking furiously lest the tears form in earnest. She holds the breath in her lungs, keeps it tight to her chest as she watches him in silence, unable to do more.

(His hands at Daenerys' thighs and her mouth at his throat and that damn silver hair gracing his furs and she – she can't – )

Sansa tastes bile at the back of her throat, her muted sob trapped behind her clenched teeth, her skin flushing with the bitter betrayal, the ripe revulsion.

Jon's eyes hold hers for only a moment longer, before they're falling to the floor, his mouth opening and closing, the regret stark and bitter on his tongue. "I  _slept_  with her, Sansa," he croaks out. "Fucked my way into her favor, traded my affections for armies,  _bartered_  myself like some… some – " He stops, closes his eyes to the thoughts, shoulders slumping with the weight of it. "And I lied to you about it," he finally manages, gaze barely lifting to hers.

The abhorrence on his features startles Sansa. A blaring, visceral reminder.

" _Did you bend the knee to save the North, or because you love her?"_

"And then she died for it," he murmurs, brows furrowed. "My own aunt. Family – fucked up as it is, and what I did was… it was dirty and ugly and I… I feel like I should feel more guilty about it all, about how it all ended up, and I  _do_  but – but not like I should. Not when I look at you – alive, gods, fucking  _alive_  – and here, with me, and with Arya and Bran and  _our home_  – this home that used to mean  _everything_  and I've just… Sansa, the things I've done – "

"You did what you had to do. For us."

"Stop defending it!"

"Jon," she urges, barely keeping the quake from her voice, hands slipping from behind her as she steps forward before she can stop herself.

And they're back to this waning space between them, back to breathing each other's air, and she can trace the curve of his furrowed brow at this distance and catch the flicker of candlelight in his drifting eyes and feel the heat of his breath on her cheeks and – and this is where it ends.

"Look at me," she demands.

He does, because he could never  _not_  look at her.

(Even when she wasn't his to look at – maybe especially then.)

"Whatever you think you've done, whatever you think you've had to do – forget it."

"Sansa – "

"I said forget it," she says icily, shoulders straightening. "I'm done wallowing in the past. I'm done climbing into your bed to ward off the nightmares. I'm done punishing myself. I'm done living for ghosts." She lifts her chin, the familiar salt tinge of tears dotting the edges of her eyes, but she blinks it back steadily. "I can't do it anymore, Jon. And I… I don't know how you still can."

"Sansa, please," he mutters, reaching for her, hands cupping her cheeks, stepping into her. She stumbles back at the motion, pushing his touch away, until she turns to the door, meaning to flee, and when her hand curls around the door handle his palm slams into the wood to keep it closed.

She stands there, breathing heavily, eyes locked on his hand against the door, feeling his hot breath at the back of her neck, his presence so looming and thrilling at her back that she practically  _feels_  him pressed up against her.

"Jon," she breathes warningly.

His other hand slips tentatively around her waist, fingers firm and yet somehow unsure, anchoring at the curve of her hip as he tugs her back toward him gently. She releases an unexpected sigh at the pressure of his chest along her back, and then she's biting her lip, shaking her head, pulling back from him.

But he doesn't let her go, fingers digging into the fabric of her dress, his heavy sigh breaking against the space between her shoulder blades when he presses his forehead to the nape of her neck. "Sansa," he breathes against her skin, a rumble rising through his chest.

She licks her lips, wraps her fingers tighter along the door handle. "Why are you here, Jon?" she asks again, but it's more a whimper than anything, more a shuddering breath that breaks from her.

He closes his eyes, breathes her in, his fingers flexing along her hip. "I've made so many mistakes, Sansa, so many wrong choices."

"And is that what I am? Just another 'wrong choice'?"

His growl breaks against the collar of her dress, his fingers curling into the wood where they're braced along the door. "No, that's not – you could never be – "

"I'm tired, Jon. I'm so… so tired." She slumps against the door, eyes squeezing shut.

"I was wrong to bring Daenerys to the North. I was wrong to leave for Dragonstone in the first place. I was…" He gulps, tries again. "I was wrong to leave you in the crypts."

The sound that leaves her is somewhere between a croak and a sob at the dark remembrance of that night.

He shifts his face so that it's braced alongside hers, his breath at her ear, his beard scratching along her neck. "I was wrong all those years ago, to think there could be peace between the Watch and the wildlings. I was wrong to think I could take Winterfell from Ramsay myself. I was wrong not to heed your advice. I was wrong to keep you in the dark. I was wrong to not refuse the crown, to not name you the rightful Queen the moment we had our home back and I was wrong for so,  _so_  much more."

She gasps when she feels the wet press of his lips at her throat, eyes snapping open, his hand winding around her waist to wrap around her stomach, pulling her more firmly against him.

"And with all these… all these wrong choices…" he pants against her neck, breath hot and wet along her skin, his chest rising and falling unsteadily at her back. "I thought maybe it was also wrong to let you to my bed. Wrong to… to feel the way I do."

The whimper breaks from her before she can catch it, her fingers flying to his arm wrapped around her waist.

Something like a moan, pained and delicate, thrums along his throat when he pushes into her, pressing her back against the door, one hand still braced against the wood, the other anchoring her to him.

"Jon," she whispers, and she doesn't know what it means anymore – his name, this feeling, this brutal tangle of emotion between them.

But then she remembers the arc of his back in the moonlight gracing his chambers, the way he hadn't looked at her, the absence of his touch searing as winter when he turned her from his bed.

His lips move against her throat languidly, his tongue peeking out to taste her – hesitant and trembling.

The silence that followed her all the way back to her lonesome, barren chambers when he'd told her to leave. The way he hadn't tried to stop her.

"No," she pants in a single, harsh breath.

Jon stills against her, silent as the grave.

(Sansa doesn't think she has the strength in her to stitch this one closed.)

"I wanted you, Jon. More than anything I've ever wanted in this world, I wanted  _you_."

She can feel his sharp intake of breath far more than she hears it. His fingers uncurl around her hip, hanging loosely onto the folds of her dress.

"But you didn't want me back." It breaks her to say it, but she steadies herself, grips at her collar, reigns in the frantic thundering of her heart – that faltering, staggered thing.

"Sansa, no, that's not – "

She whips around to face him, only slightly shaken at his mouth so close to hers, his heat still sinking into her with his proximity. She fumbles for the door handle behind her, pulling it open as she steps forward to accommodate the motion, Jon stumbling back at her closeness.

"Please leave," she tells him, voice a tight thread of unease, ready to snap, ready to split right down those terribly thinning seams.

"Sansa." His face falls, his hands retreating from her, returning to his sides in limp resignation.

"If you have any affection for me still," she begins, eyes closing once more, tongue pressing to the roof of her mouth for some semblance of control, "then you will leave."

He stands there before her for long moments, simply staring at her, and then his gaze falls to the floor, and then to the open door at her back, catching the way her hand trembles along the edge, fingers curled tight against the wood.

But he doesn't say a word. Doesn't do anything but walk from the room like she'd asked him to.

And this scene is too familiar in all the wrong ways.

Sansa stands breathing unsteadily in the empty space of her room, hand slowly pushing the door shut behind her.

She'd asked him to leave.

And he did.

But Sansa thinks maybe she's getting too used to shutting doors.

* * *

Sometimes Jon watches Bran watching Meera. Sometimes he watches Arya watching Gendry.

Sansa crosses the courtyard and Jon looks up from his conversation with Tormund and Ser Davos.

(Sometimes he wonders who's watching him watch her.)

But Starks have always been bitterly stubborn. Even when it hurts.

* * *

Sansa has grown familiar with this scene – Arya sitting across her desk in her solar, cleaning her Valyrian dagger, keeping quiet company while Sansa updates Winterfell's ledgers. But Arya is especially sour this evening, swiping the oiled cloth along her blade with a quiet vehemence that doesn't escape Sansa's notice.

She sighs and sets her quill down along the parchment, linking her fingers together atop the desk. "What is it?"

Arya stills her cloth, raising a brow at her sister.

Sansa cocks her head and raises an identical brow.

Arya narrows her eyes, huffing her annoyance and going back to her work. "I don't know what you mean."

"You know exactly what I mean."

She stills again, eyes flicking to the far wall.

Sansa takes the moment to watch her sister, to mark the way she still purses her lips in that familiar tell of frustration, how her brow still quivers just slightly above her dark eyes, how she cocks her head in such an achingly familiar way – how she would know her face anywhere, behind any mask or skin – how she is still her little sister.

How she has missed her these long years, even when she didn't want to.

"Arya."

(Even when she dreamed of her.)

Arya shoots a guarded glance at Sansa, fingers tightening over the blade in her hand. "He told me I was beautiful."

Sansa's mouth parts as though to speak but she finds only air lighting her tongue. She furrows her brows in confusion.

Arya looks down, eyes fixed to the papers lining Sansa's desk, her face pinched tight. "Gendry. He told me I was beautiful."

Sansa stares at her sister for long moments, long enough to make Arya shift in her seat, attention returning to her work, shoulders pulled back sharply.

"It's stupid. This whole thing's stupid. And he's… just  _stupid_ ," she mutters, eyes focused, dark, blinking furiously.

"It's not," Sansa finds herself saying suddenly, her chest constricting at the look her sister sends her – cagey and uncertain and filled with quiet hope. Sansa leans forward and brushes a loose strand of hair behind Arya's ear, eyes never leaving hers. "It's not. And you  _are_. Beautiful, that is."

Arya purses her lips, throat flexing beneath words she never brings to air, the sheen of wetness over her eyes suddenly apparent.

Her sister. Her little sister. Her darling, bold, brilliant sister.

Arya opens her mouth, closes it, stares unblinkingly at Sansa, face pinching into a mask of doubt. "I'm scared," she whispers, almost too soft for Sansa to hear. But then she clears her throat, doesn't wipe at the wetness truly gathering at the corners of her eyes now. She stares Sansa down, something quiet and frail flooding into her features.

"I'm scared, Sansa."

All at once, Sansa realizes that she is, too. Scared beyond belief, beyond measure, beyond restraint.

So filled to the brim with terror that she tastes it on her tongue – bitter and sharp and like copper too familiar to name.

(Like blood she has never learned to swallow.)

She remembers Theon's embrace the night before the battle for Winterfell, and she remembers her mother's smile at one end of that long, beaten King's Road, and she remembers the way Jon's arms had fit so surely and so securely around her that day she rode through the gates of Castle Black and never looked back.

And she remembers how she had lost them each.

Yes, Sansa is scared, far more scared than she can ever voice but then here – sitting here before her – with a face full of trepidation and hands gripping tightly to her blade for some kind of familiar security –  _here_  before her, like she'd never imagined she'd ever be again – sits her sister.

She wants to hug her suddenly, desperately, without reservation.

Instead, she leans forward to wrap a hand over Arya's clenched one.

"So am I," she admits, the words hitting air like a gasp.

Arya dips her head, eyes wet, lip sucked firmly between her teeth.

Sansa will not have it.

She lifts her chin with her other hand. "Arya."

Her sister meets her gaze reluctantly, a tremulous breath escaping her lips.

Sansa sets her demanding gaze on her. "Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?"

Arya blinks at her, mouth opening, and then closing, her mind reeling behind wide, dark eyes.

Sansa will take her to lay winter roses at the foot of their father's ruined stone statue when this is over, when their ghosts have finally laid to rest. She will take her sister by the hand and lead her through the shadows, through the cold stone and ashes of their blood lining the walk. And she will let her cry into her arms, if that is what she wants, when she is ready. When they are  _both_  ready. When the dawn is no longer a blood-drenched promise.

Arya squares her shoulders, the tears gathering at the corners of her eyes suddenly forgotten. "That is the only time a man  _can_  be brave," she quotes back, their father's words thrumming and alive between them.

She squeezes her sister's hand beneath hers, doesn't break her gaze.

Oh yes, how she has missed her. But she thinks she may never have to again.

* * *

She finds him in the godswood, and it hits her like a gasp of air amidst drowning – how so like their father ( _her_  father) he looks. His back is turned slightly to her, head tilted up to watch the wayward sway of the branches in the bitterly cold breeze, the profile of his face a vague glimpse of familiarity in the haze of falling snow.

She's seen her father like this, she knows. Alone in the godswood, eyes fixed to the weirwood, bundled in furs her mother sowed for him herself, and she thinks maybe that means something – that Jon still wears her furs, that she has cloaked him, here beneath the heart tree like her lady mother did her lord father.

She thinks it  _has_  to mean something. Because she's too far gone for it not to anymore.

He sighs at the soft crunch of snow signaling her approach, eyes drifting toward the ground. She doesn't see the way he bunches his hands into fists beneath the cover of his cloak.

"Winter hasn't left us yet," he says (and she wildly wonders if he's speaking in abstracts now, and it's so jarringly  _not him_ , because he's never been one for words, much less poignancy, and it startles her into stillness just a few paces from him). He glances at her over his shoulder. "The wind still bites." He shuffles his furs around his shoulders in meaning. "You should return to the castle."

And  _gods_ , sometimes she could strangle him.

Sansa frowns, stealing a single, charged breath through the frigid air before she moves to stand in front of him, purposely signaling her refusal to retreat. She stares him down.

He sighs softly, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Sansa…"

"Are we not allowed to be happy?"

Her words still him, his hand hovering over his face a moment before he finally lowers it, eyes drifting up to meet hers.

It seems so simple suddenly.

And yes, how like her father he's always been. That somberness, that unnerving steadiness to his gaze, that foolhardy way he could never hold his tongue – not for fear or for subservience or even for love. And how like her father he'd always wanted to be. How duty-bound and honorable and  _just_  he'd always strived to be – even when it killed him.

(Even when it brought a white-haired queen into their home, her presence as chilling as the dead, and just as damning.)

Even when it took him from her – with his bed lying half-cold beneath the weight of her absence.

Licking her lips as she steadies herself, Sansa steps closer.

Jon watches her warily, unable (or unwilling) to move, his body a rigid line of unease, cognizant of her every move.

(And it seems so simple suddenly.)

She sighs, her face openly bearing her longing when she meets his gaze. "Are we not allowed to be happy? After everything – after…  _everything_." The breath rakes from her with a vehemence she hadn't expected.

Jon's throat flexes with his silence, eyes unmoving from hers.

She looks down at his closed fists, watches the flakes of snow settling into his skin, the rush of Winter still blaring and bright between them. She reaches for his hand, curls her fingers along his knuckles and tries to anchor him there beneath her desperate clutch.

He sucks in a breath, trembling – absolutely  _trembling_  beneath her touch.

She wants to hold him then, to hold him and hold him and  _hold him_. To brace him against her chest and feel their heartbeats meld, to wait in thunderous apprehension until they beat in unison, to press her lips to his brow and feel his hands smoothing up her back and the catch of breath he'd release against her throat and the soft tangle of his curls at her fingertips and the easy, reassuring weight of his warmth pressed to her.

To hold him – to  _truly_  hold him – and to never let go.

She closes her eyes, waiting for his answer, whatever it may be.

Snow continues to fall. The leaves rustle in the branches above their heads. And Jon keeps his silence long enough that Sansa begins to feel the sob bubbling up her throat, unbidden.

And then his fist shifts in her hold, his palm unfurling, his calloused fingers fumbling for hers.

Sansa opens her eyes to his.

"I  _was_  happy, Sansa." He catches his breath, licks his lips as he flicks his gaze down to their joined hands. "Because nothing has ever made me as happy as having you."

She sucks the breath through her teeth, stepping closer unconsciously, the heady anticipation lighting her bones.

"But we both know it's not as simple as that."

Her brows furrow, fingers loosening around his hand, as though they may pull away entirely.

And then he's wrapping both hands around hers, bringing her small fist up to his mouth and planting a kiss to the inside of her wrist, his warm, staggered breath filling her palm, his lips chapped and rough against her pulse point.

She stills at the sheer fervor of it, at the tender ardor of his lips to her skin, his eyes hooded as he keeps his gaze low.

"Why…" She stops, the breath stalling in her chest at the heat of his touch, watching as he slowly pulls his lips from her wrist. "Why can't it be that simple?" she croaks out – desperate and vulnerable and demanding all at once.

Jon swipes a gentle thumb along the inside of her wrist, smoothing along the place his mouth had been, eyes never leaving the motion. "Because if I'm to have you, Sansa, it will be for life."

Her heart falters at the words, catching between her ribs.

Jon flicks his gaze up to hers, dark and exposed. "Do you understand what that means, Sansa? Do you understand – " He fumbles, clears his throat, continues. "Do you understand why I hesitated? Why I… why I'm  _still_  hesitating? Because I'd rather have you for a sister than not at all and I don't know what I'd do if I ruined that, too. And I'm so,  _so_  scared, Sansa. I don't think I've ever been this scared in my life and I don't know how to fix that."

Sansa stares at him, blinking wildly beneath his gaze, mouth parting.

Such a stupid, foolish boy.

The tears hit her eyes sooner than she expects.

Jon's brows scrunch together at the sight, one hand lifting to her cheek to scrub away a tear with the pad of his thumb. "Sansa."

"Then be brave with me, Jon," she says, pulling her hand free of his to cup his face, leaning into him with an intensity and a need that overtakes her.

His hands curl around her wrists, holding her to him, his face pinched tight with uncertainty, the faint tremor of fear still blooming beneath his skin and she can't stop herself suddenly. She can't leash the flare of exhilaration, can't keep her chest steady beneath her raging breath, can't do anything at all but –

Kiss him.

And she does. With mouth and hands and heart. She kisses him.

He sucks in a breath at the motion, eyes closing, stumbling slightly in the snow with her fervency, his hands slipping from her wrists to sink into her hair, tangling in the copper strands as he opens to her, presses his mouth so terribly hard against hers that she thinks they may break beneath the strain, might just fracture right there in the godswood, littering the snow with the broken shards of their yearning, the cut of their hunger.

When they break away, panting, she rests her forehead to his, flexes her fingers along his jaw, revels in the scratch of his beard along her palms, the warm puff of his breath filling her mouth. "If you will be brave with me," she begins, the quake of her voice threatening to splinter her words entirely, "Then I will be brave with you."

One of his arms slips around her waist as he yanks her to him, burying his face in her shoulder, his other hand tightening in her hair. She doesn't hear the sob that leaves him so much as she feels it, a ragged, body-wracking exhale that rattles all the way down to her bones, her fingers gripping at his furs to keep herself steady.

And so, she holds him.

As he holds her.

As their bravery seeps into their marrow and begins to take root.

* * *

"The Northern lords will not be as opposed as you think."

Jon looks up at Bran's words, catches the way the fire from the hearth flickers soft shadows across his face, Arya shifts in her seat across from them, her oiled cloth stilled over Needle.

"What do you mean?" Jon's brows scrunch together.

Arya listens nonchalantly, continuing her cleaning of her blade.

"When you seek Sansa's hand."

Jon nearly splutters, a short coughing sound catching in his throat when he rubs a hand over his mouth and flicks his gaze to Arya.

She's still again, eyes narrowed between her brothers.

Jon looks back to Bran and shakes his head. "Bran, that's not… we haven't – "

"But you will."

Jon closes his mouth abruptly.

Arya sighs across from them, shaking her head as she sheaths Needle. "I can't believe you two are talking about this."

Jon groans, regretting instantly that he ever asked them to his chambers after dinner, that he ever thought they could be the family they once were (even when he'd rather have the family they are now – Sansa included).

Arya stands swiftly.

"Arya, sit down, will you?"

She turns her wary eyes to Jon. "You're our  _brother_."

"I'm not though." The words catch in his throat, heavy and jagged, a crude stone travelling from maw to gut – sinking low in his stomach. "I'm not."

Arya narrows her eyes at him, nostrils flaring. "You  _are_."

"He's the son of Rhaegar Targaryen, heir to the Ir – "

"I know all of that, Bran, I  _know_ ," she snaps. "But he's…" She looks back to Jon. "You're…"

He doesn't do anything but watch her, waiting, hoping. His hands slide over his knees in keen disquiet.

Sighing, Arya's shoulders slump as she tears her gaze away, fixing to a point across the room, to the muted grey stone that used to be a cage to him in his younger years. In his lost years.

Oh, but to be a Stark in Winterfell –

Sansa has been the closest thing to realizing that dream of his. Because to be hers –

He thinks maybe that's what being a Stark means in the end. More than blood. More than titles. More than duty.

_"You are to me."_

She makes him a Stark with every demanding gaze and every unflinching word and every heated touch.

She makes him a Stark because she loves him as a Snow and if he's learned anything from the North, it's that nothing matters more than choice.

And Sansa chose  _him_.

It isn't, perhaps, the way he'd always imagined becoming a Stark, but it is, for certain, the only way he'd ever accept now.

"I don't understand it," Arya says softly, hesitantly, eyes still fixed to the wall. "I don't…  _understand_ , but – " She stops, shifts her gaze back to Jon's. "But I'll try – for you. For you both."

Jon releases the breath he'd been holding tight to his chest since the moment she stood.

Arya looks to the ground a moment, fingers curling around her belt in some small measure of surety. "Because she's the bravest person I know and I think I owe her that much." She shakes her head, fingers tightening over her belt, and then she's turning from them, huffing her frustration. "This is so strange. This is so… gods, but our  _brother_."

"Arya."

Her name on his lips stops her with her hand on the door, her back resolutely to him.

Jon rises from his seat, unsure, standing halfway between the hearth and his sister at the door, Bran still sitting silently behind him, eyes lingering on the fire in the hearth rather than the scene before him. "I know this isn't… how you wanted things to happen but – "

"Will you be kind?"

Her question throws him, startles him to stillness, his breath catching in his chest.

Arya presses a fist to the wood of the door, eyes fixed to the motion. "Will you be kind to her?" she repeats, voice eerily steady.

Jon swallows back the trepidation, nodding. "Yes." The answer is easier than he thinks.

"Will you be faithful?"

He squares his shoulders. "Yes."

She sighs, her fist unfurling before sliding down the door to rest along the handle. "Will you be constant?"

"Yes."

She looks at him over her shoulder, her face earnest and temperate all at once, her eyes a familiar grey ( _you may not have my name, but you have my blood_ ). She takes a breath, holds it but a moment, and then lets it taste air, nodding just the once, a short, adamant tilt of her head. "Good. She deserves that, at the very least."

Jon watches her, mouth parted, a mute nod his only answer.

Arya glances over to Bran, and then back to Jon, sighing with the weight of something Jon is hesitant to name. "Then there's nothing else I want," she explains to him, before pulling the door free and walking from the room.

Jon slumps back into his chair.

Bran shrugs the furs from his shoulders and lets them bunch in his lap, his eyes taking in the fire still snapping before them. "She's always been a touch dramatic. They have that in common," he says lightly, as though in commiseration, but there is no lilt to his voice, no indication of anything nostalgic.

Jon snaps his gaze to his younger cousin. "You – " He stops, catches the chuckle as it lines his throat, wiping a hand down his mouth and shaking his head.

Bran glances at him out of the corner of his eye.

Jon settles his face into his hands, letting the laugh overtake him then.

If he only looks, he would see Bran's smile in the firelight, tame and mild as a Northern summer.

* * *

Jon winds his arm around Sansa's waist, tugging her into the tight curve of his body as they lay atop his furs, her mouth parting at the sigh he levels at her lips.

His hand smooths slow circles into the small of her back as he watches her, eyes flicking over the curve of her jaw and the slant of her eyes and the wisps of her copper hair.

Sansa lifts her hand to brace along the fading scar lining his brow, tracing the edges with tenderness. "It's almost gone now," she whispers into the night.

Jon hums lowly beneath her touch, closing his eyes beneath her hand.

"As though it had never been," she says softly, her hand retreating, sliding down along his jaw, past his throat, and splaying against his chest.

Except it will always be. These scars. These marks of war. These remnants of a long-fought night and a deadly-still dawn. These reminders of why they ever started this tangle of limbs beneath the damning moonlight.

Jon's eyes flutter open to watch her.

When he catches the faint tremor of her smile tugging at her lips, her hand curling into his tunic, her eyes shifting low, he doesn't think he'll ever stop wanting her, needing her, finding solace from the scars in her welcoming arms.

This balm, her salve, the way her breath pools at the base of his throat, is anchor enough.

She pushes a thigh between his legs tentatively, eyes never meeting his, and his hand stops its motion at her back, fisting in the material of her shift, his responding groan breaking against her mouth.

He can feel the rise of her chest against his at the sound, her breath hitching, tongue flicking out to wet her lips.

"Sansa," he moans, his hips rolling instinctively into hers, his hand braced against her back where he presses her into him.

"Kiss me," she says, and this time it isn't a demand. It's more a fact than anything. More an inevitable truth.

It is easy to be brave now, when he's pressed this closely to her, when her sighs light something in him that never truly leaves, when she looks him in the eye and doesn't blink.

Afraid. And brave all the same.

When he presses his lips to hers he can't collar the moan that breaks from him, or the way his hand slides over her hip greedily, or the way he pushes her back against the furs and drapes her with his weight, his heat, his eager body curling tight against hers.

He fumbles for her hand, winding his fingers through hers, stitching their palms together with a keening need, an intensity just shy of feverish.

Her woolen dress lays abandoned on the floor 'til morning, the tallow of his room's candles burning low, and sometime in the night, when their courage flares bright and long and languid, he whispers his affections into her skin like a promising dawn, silencing their ghosts with a forgotten twilight.


End file.
